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machine or the damming of a river-has in my opinion nothing more
than the purely negative value of a constriction and a falsification
when it is applied to matters which we must call things of the spirit.
And who are those who most readily apply technique to activities
which have nothing to do with technique? Precisely those men whose
moral conscience is on the point of being extinguished, or in whom
it has not yet been born; men whose intellectual powers become
arbitrary and gratuitous because they are out of balance due to the
lack of other deeper forces. Technique, this key which opens all
doors except those of the spirit, is the special divinity of men and
nations which are worn out or still at a barb.arian stage; of those
whose moral life, through fatigue or innocence, is almost spent or
yet to come: for men and nations which have a complete culture
make use of technique, but do not place it on the altar. On the
other hand, in men and nations which are exhausted or primitive,
technique flatters the pride which believes it can thereby dethrone
the spirit and attain mechanically results which others have reached
by the slow and secret paths of culture and the virtues of the mind.
In a broad sense these men and peoples are profoundly irreligious:
in the sense of completely skeptical or even completely ignorant.
Guicciardini, to whom one must necessarily refer when speaking
of Machiavelli, has a cruel sentence about those who frequently cite
the example of Rome. "What a mistake is made by those who at
every moment allude to the Romans.
It
would be necessary to have
a city conditioned as theirs was, and then govern according to their
example: otherwise the comparison is as out of proportion, for some–
one having disproportionate qualities, as it would be to expect a
donkey to run the way a horse does." Now in my opinion Machia–
velli's error lay not so much in his alluding to the Romans at every
other word, as in the external and rhetorical way he referred to them;
he looked back to the supposed political technique of that great
people for the simple reason that he was not in a position to see
what other sources of strength, far more valid and profound than
purely political and military virtues, had contributed to build their
greatness. Perhaps, in one word, religious virtues, not merely technical
ones. Precisely those virtues which had made the greatness of the
papacy which Machiavelli scorned; those sources of strength which
come from considering how one should live and not how one does
live, from abandoning what is done for what should be done.
